View from the North 40: They'll bite you when you're down

For all you people who feel like bad things keep happening to you when you’re stressed and overwhelmed by life already, a group of researchers at the University of Liverpool in England offers one more set of data to help prove that it’s not just a feeling, it is a fact and they say you should prepare to get bit. By a dog.

To clarify, the study did not say that sad sack, down on your luck, depressed, oppressed or otherwise bluer than blue people were getting bit while they were down, just the clinically neurotic, nervous people. Yes, that includes people who get anxious around dogs — because the universe thrives on irony.

The researchers surveyed almost 700 people who had to answer questions like, of course, have you ever been bitten by a dog, also whether they knew the dog and how severe the bite was. Then they had to take a short 10-item personality test.

What the numbers revealed was that the more emotionally stable — read less neurotic — a person is, the less likely that person is to get a dog bite and, conversely, the likeliness of getting bit rises along with the respondents’ neurotic behavior. Neurotic people, the study says, are 22 percent more likely to get bit by a dog than emotionally stable people.

The study also says that people who own several dogs are 3.3 times more likely to have been bitten, which makes sense. I mean, I’m no data junkie and don’t remember much beyond rudimentary math, but I think any bookie in the world could guess that the more dogs you are around 24/7 the better your odds of getting a dog bite.

The study’s authors pointed out that neuroticism is associated with insecurity, fear, self-consciousness, anxiety and being temperamental.

So at this point I would like to point out that the study also found that men are almost two times more likely to get bit than women. I’m sure the argument for this number could be made that men might be more likely to own a dog or put themselves in a situation where they are protecting someone, or they are getting bit for other reasons like being overbearing.

I’m just going to go with the assumption that men are more likely to be neurotic — not because it’s true or even because I want to pick on men, just because looking at the statistics and coming up with a sideways conclusion annoys people.

Besides, experts say the data will tell you anything you want if you torture it long enough, so it could be true.

However, because I’m all for equal opportunity insults, let’s just assume that women would get the higher statistic in a study on cat bites, with top cat-bite honors going to older single women. That crazy old cat-lady stereotype has to have some truth to it.

The study authors say the research is based on a cross-sectional study of the 1,280 household county of Cheshire in northwestern England. Only about one-third of households were surveyed, with an average of about two respondents from each.

In the world of research, this is a pretty small test group for drawing wide conclusions. I would also entertain the argument, therefore, that maybe this one community has some “Harvest Home” type secret that involves a kind of whacked-out pact to eradicate the colorful neurotic people with attack dogs.

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Who knows what ideas those Brits could think up over tea and crumpets at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40/.